I don't want to live by FOMO

This morning, I read an article on The Verge entitled, "I tried leaving Faceook. I couldn't."

In it, the author talks about one year she was off Facebook because of a terms of use violation, but how otherwise, in 12 years, she's been on in spite of not liking it. Besides the "groups" function, which really annoys me, too, because there are plenty of useful groups and FB used to have a Groups app you could access without the rest of the site, her basic reason boils down to Fear of Missing Out (or FOMO).

"I missed big personal news from people I knew. I missed dance parties and house parties and casual get-togethers. I was the last to find out about births and the last to see baby pictures. Classmates got engaged and married and I didn’t find out until after my hiatus."

I get it. I used to have over 200 views on my boring daily blog posts. Now that I'm off of Facebook (and therefore don't share the link), I get 30 on a good day. But I don't need readers enough to justify staying on a social platform that no longer serves me.

Because here's the truth: Any person who read (and presumably enjoyed, if they kept coming back; perhaps it was morbid curiosity) could find me and even sign up for notifications when I publish an entry. They were clicking through out of convenience.

That's a point the author above makes: Facebook does the "emotional labor" of maintaining contact with people so we don't have to. Thing is, that's only sort of true. It casts such a wide net that it feels like connection, even when it's not.

If I don't get invited to a friend's (or friend's kid's) birthday party because I'm not on Facebook... How good of friends are we, actually? If I want a friend or one of Mal's friends to come over, I'll contact them personally. Same with birthdays or meet-ups.

I don't really want to be "convenience" friends. I'd rather have one or two people who miss me so that after a while will reach out and suggest we get together sometime. If I miss that someone got married, then that will be something cool to talk about when we see each other. They can tell me a story well-worn to most people, but it will all be new and exciting to me!

Some people have asked me why I got off of Facebook whenever I did it. I don't have a pat answer. It wasn't the data stuff. It wasn't the polarization. It wasn't the time suck. It wasn't one thing. At some point, I just decided that it wasn't serving me, and I cut ties.

One thing that was a definite emotional drain on me was confrontations over misunderstood articulations of opinions, misunderstandings that would be much more easily avoided in a face-to-face conversation. I'd spend time offline mentally constructing replies that were gracious but absolved me of unflattering or ill-fitting opinions that had been assigned to me.

So many of my conversations in person were starting with, "Somebody posted..." I was being exposed to information not of my choosing, and it was taking up mental bandwidth that is already at a premium, what with maintaining a house with a teenager and a preschooler.

There might be downsides to leaving the largest social media platform on the planet, but I haven't felt any of them strongly enough to consider jumping back in.

Everybody have a great week! (All 18 of you!)